Guts of Maple
by starofoberon
Summary: Sometimes these things write me rather than the reverse. Hotchner and Strauss discover common interests. Yes. Really. Some decorous steam is generated - they're on federal property, after all. I really need feedback on this puppy, please!


Usual disclaimer, yada yada, but wouldn't they have a lot more fun if I did own them, and not CBS and the producers of Criminal Minds?

Set post Season 5 and its various nightmares.

_I started this as a challenge to myself, to write a meaningless little smut-nik about this admittedly bizarre pairing for my own amusement, but the characters seized control. They demanded dignity and compassion._

_So here it is._

**Guts of Maple**

Lately, he had found himself unconsciously holding his breath each time he all but tiptoed past Bureau Chief Erin Strauss's door. Anything to keep that door from opening, particularly late at night when she seemed to crave fresh targets.

It wasn't that he was afraid of her. You had to be a lot scarier than Strauss to strike fear into Aaron Hotchner's heart. But she governed profiling – all three units - with the cold finality of a woman who had authority, but no confidence that she could retain it if anyone else coveted it. She also had the wellbeing of his unit cradled in her opalescent-pink-taloned paws.

This walled off some choices from his menu of responses. Satisfying as it might be to say, "Fuck you, you incompetent hag," when she was particularly nasty and arbitrary, that attitude could sink his unit, and the unit came first. So every damn time, he choked back the snarl, sucked it up and said, "Yes, ma'am."

He figured the stress of each _yes,_ _ma'am_ shaved a few weeks off his life, but if that was what it took to protect his team, fine. So be it.

For this and lesser reasons, meetings with Strauss were hardly something he awaited with breathless anticipation. So, yeah, OK, maybe it was a little wimpy, but any time he had a chance to avoid a face-to-face with her, his instinct was to grab it.

Four more steps, and he was safely past - but, no, he could hear her door open, could hear its bottom edge whisper against the thick carpeting that personnel at her supervisory level enjoyed.

"Agent Hotchner."

Her voice, as always, was a whiplash across his shoulders. It had to be something they taught in Bureau Chief school. Enough exposure to it could make him hate his own name.

Ever respectful of authority, no matter how unearned and creepy, he turned. "Ma'am?"

"I need to see you for a minute."

He nodded assent and entered her office. Strauss seated herself at her desk. Recently, she had begun keeping her visitors' chairs arranged on either side of a drum table in the far corner. Those who found her behind her desk, therefore, found themselves standing up for however long the inquisition lasted. Allegedly it was some management thing to ensure that conferences were brief and no time was wasted. Hotch didn't know anybody who believed that. She just liked to make people stand. It fed her need to feel powerful.

His mind raced as he stood there fighting the urge to fidget, wondering what he had done or had not done, weighing recent incidents that might bring her big-footing down on the unit and on him.

One potential problem was that he badly needed a shave. He'd had a problem beard practically since puberty, and he'd been shaving twice a day since his mid-twenties. But it was almost ten on a Friday night, and he had not expected to do anything in the later part of the day but putter around in his office, dotting his **I**s and crossing his **T**s before a scheduled long weekend. His beard dated back to seven-thirty that morning, which made it both coarse and highly visible.

Rather than ask her what was up, he stood silent and waited for her power move. Visitors who stood before her desk always found her in her reading glasses. She would take them off slowly, deliberately, fold them into their case, and finally look up as if just noticing that someone was there, even when, as now, she had personally escorted her visitor in.

Her reading glasses tonight were tinted dark pink, almost rose. Hotchner wondered whether they were new; he could not recall seeing them before. She had several pairs of reading glasses, one pair as boring as the next; this tinting was unfamiliar. Uncharacteristic. Strauss and her office were symphonies of neutral colors. The rosy glasses stood out against all those variations on eggshell and beige, gray and taupe.

Another jangling note, although it could mean almost anything: Both of the family portraits on her desk lay face-down.

No power move. Reading glasses still on, she looked up through them at him with that blank what-are-you-doing-here look for only an instant, then she smiled faintly.

"You're here late tonight, Agent Hotchner."

"Yes, ma'am."

When the angle of her glasses was just right, he could see that she was looking at the lower half of his face. So the beard must be her current problem, he decided. Easier to answer to than the team's screwup in Alabama last month. He'd been waiting and waiting for the hammer to fall on that one. He'd almost decided that they'd been given a blessed pass.

Or maybe the beard was merely the appetizer, and Tuscaloosa would be the main course.

"Agent Hotchner."

There is something to the playground retort, _That's my name, don't wear it out_.

He repressed a sigh. "Ma'am."

"Perhaps we should go and sit at the table," she said.

He nodded automatically. Felt that this was likely a positive move on her part, but he probably wasn't out of the woods yet. He moved over to the table and took the chair further from the window.

Nice chair. Nice table, too. He ran his fingers gently over its surface. It looked like mahogany.

She must have noticed his touch. "It's mahogany," she said as she came around her desk. "A veneer. A good veneer, and beautifully applied, but it's still a veneer. The real thing, the guts of it, is stained maple."

"Good workmanship," he said. He liked to play at carpentry himself sometimes, although he had escaped from ninth grade wood shop with a skin-of-the-teeth C that both he and Mr. Archer knew should have been a D.

"I'm glad you like it. Will you join me in a drink?"

He looked up at her. She stood indecisively at the corner of her desk, one hand on a drawer pull. He smiled and said, "Certainly, thank you."

He wasn't sure what he expected - especially since alcoholic beverages were technically forbidden on Federal property. A couple hits of scotch would go down wonderfully well under the circumstances, but for all he knew, she had cans of warm diet soda in her desk.

But what she extracted from her drawer were two tiny crystal liqueur glasses so delicate they barely had any substance to them at all, followed by a biggish bottle of Drambuie, about two-thirds full.

She carried them over carefully, the glasses in one hand, the bottle in the other. The glasses tinkled and clinked together repeatedly as she set them down. She seated herself across from him, unscrewed the cap of the bottle, and began pouring out the pale amber liquid. Her hands were unsteady, he realized. Almost trembling.

She took one glass. "Down the hatch," she said with what seemed like forced cheer. He watched her to see whether she meant literally to gulp it down – he knew nothing of Erin Strauss's drinking habits – but no, she took it slowly, savoring it.

He picked up his own drink and faked a smile of appreciation. He had always thought Drambuie tasted like dish soap with sugar in it. He took a cautious sip.

It still did.

"Where's Jack tonight?" she asked.

"Ohio, with some of the Brooks family. I'm flying up there tomorrow morning. You approved my application for the long weekend," he reminded her, hoping she wouldn't try to use that as a weapon.

"You're right," she said. "How nice for you! Do you have big plans?"

He wasn't sure how much he liked a chatty Strauss. "We'll be out on a friend's boat on Lake Erie tomorrow afternoon, and on Sunday we're going to an amusement park."

"Oh, to Cedar Point?"

"Yes, that sounds right," he replied, startled.

"It's beautiful," she told him. "It's on a peninsula that pokes right out into the lake, as I recall. Some of the rides run over the water."

"You know northern Ohio?"

She made a modest gesture. "One of my brothers is still – at his age – a 'coaster head,' or whatever they call themselves these days. When I was still at home, sometimes we would make his obsessions part of our family getaways. We visited quite a few amusement parks across the country. I was impressed with Cedar Point – but that was a while back, of course."

Aaron Hotchner, who could vividly imagine any vile thing a human being might do, found that he could not for the life of him picture Erin Strauss on a roller coaster.

"Can I pour you some more-"

"No, no thank you, Chief Strauss-"

And he thought she had called him Aaron, but then he realized she was prompting him to call her Erin.

"Erin," he said awkwardly, unwillingly, with a slight emphasis on the **I** in the second syllable, hoping she would not interpret it as an invitation to call him by his first name. "No more for me, thank you." He shifted his weight in his chair, preparatory to standing up. "Is there anything else, ma'am?"

She rose before he did, still wearing the pink reading glasses. "Agent Hotchner," she said gently, "why don't you ever loosen your tie?"

The question took him by surprise, and he grinned a little as he got to his feet. "Jason Gideon asked me that same question once," he confessed.

Her eyes widened behind the lenses. "Really! And what did you say?"

"I didn't say anything."

"And did you loosen your tie?"

"No," he replied. He thought about describing the circumstances, the attack by whats-his-name, the hit man who turned out also to be a sadistic psychopath, but no. Too much detail, too much effort. "Gideon loosened it for me."

She gazed up at him with a surprisingly solemn expression. "So that's what it takes? All right, then." She reached out slowly, as though not wanting to frighten a small animal, and tugged at the knot in his tie. "Relax," she told him. "I have sons. I know my way around a necktie."

Before he could find a tactful way to pull free of her fingers – it was a tough call whether her actions were more inappropriate than surreal, or the other way around – he happened to view her at a different angle through her reading glasses. Her eyes were puffy, red-rimmed. No wonder she was wearing pink lenses. They were to camouflage the evidence of her tears.

And Mr. Red Hot Profiler had missed them because he couldn't be bothered to put much time into observing Strauss that evening.

So he just stood there like a stunned ox and let her slowly undo his tie. The back of her hand brushed his inadequately shaved jaw once. She murmured an apology, her cheeks as pink as her glasses. Then she pulled the tie free, folded it twice, tucked it into one of his suit coat pockets, and gave the pocket a little maternal pat.

He glanced back at the table. How much of that Drambuie had she'd been into already?

She loosened the top button of his shirt. Again her fingers grazed his stubble. "There," she said, stepping back with a small smile. "You look a little less frightening now."

"Frightening?" he echoed.

She thought that over. "Intimidating." She fussed self-consciously with his lapels and continued, "It's scary enough that people's secrets aren't safe around you and your team. I don't mean that you expose them; you're all discresh- discreet," she corrected. "Insofar as I know. But it's frightening. And then you, you emphasize it with all that buttoned-up formality. I'm sure it's effective in an interrogation, but among colleagues, it's off-putting. It really is. Nobody likes to feel psychologically naked, especially in front of subordinates."

_Whoa._ He understood that one. Sometimes he caught himself cringing when he remembered how over the past year, his team had seen him haunted, tormented, irrational. Helpless. Out of control.

Sometimes you run your inner profiler, and sometimes your inner profiler runs you. Aaron Hotchner's inner profiler vaulted into the saddle at that instant and dug its spurs into his ribs. Without questioning, because he had learned always to trust its wisdom, he obeyed its instructions.

He touched the chief's elbow and said in a low, gentle tone, "How long has he been gone?"

That was all it took: one sentence of concern.

For a long moment, she said nothing, just stood before him looking down at the floor, her face crimson. Her body shuddered as though she were a damaged engine slowly chugging toward self-destruction. When she did speak, her voice was thick with loathing. "I didn't mind that he was fucking her," she spat. "He could fuck her all day, every day, and I wouldn't give a shit."

Then her agonized eyes met his and she blazed, "But he loves her! He actually loves her! He would rather talk to her than talk to me. Would rather be with her than be with me! And if she's a day over twenty, I'll be pretty damn surprised, and probably anorexic, just a little toothpick of a thing with big hair and Kim Basinger lips. She wears Jonas Brothers tees, for Christ's sake, and she sends him erotic text messages. He thinks they're cute! He shows them to his buddies at work! And her voice, her voice – it's wispy, and whiny, and, and – and clingy, and vague, a-and stupid, like Julie Hagerty in _Airplane!"_

And Erin Strauss launched herself at Hotchner's chest and burst into sobs.

Ah, a woman in distress: something he understood. He actually did women-in-distress rather well, as long as he hadn't been the proximate cause of the distress. He wrapped his arms around her and rocked ever so slightly from side to side, murmuring, "Shh, shh, it's all right, it's all right," in his dark hypnotic baritone.

After a couple minutes she pulled her head back just a little and gave an embarrassed mumble about what a mess she was making of his shirt, and he patted her head and pressed it right back down against his shirt front. "Shh, it's fine, it's just fine," he assured her. And it was. Between victims and families and manipulative UNSUBs, he had long ago resigned himself to the fact that his clothing would absorb more than the average person's lifetime allotment of makeup, tears, and snot.

She raised her face so her lips were against his jaw and whispered, "Was Haley unfaithful?"

And because of the moment, because of its intimacy and surprise, he heard himself speak the words he had never said aloud before. "I think so," he whispered back. "I can't prove it, though. And she's gone now, so it's irrelevant."

"Do you still love her?"

"That isn't something I can just turn off like a faucet. Yes, I still love her."

She slid her arms under his coat and around his waist. "Sometimes I think that it isn't Walter I miss, but the relationship I thought I had. Thought _we_ had. But it's all so new! How long will it hurt like this?"

He sighed deeply. "I'll tell you as soon as it stops hurting me." Scarcely believing he was doing it, he bent and kissed her forehead. "I think you're right, though, about what I miss. I think I'm mourning a lot more for the loss of the relationship I thought we had – the relationship I _wanted_ us to have - than I am mourning the loss of Haley, the individual."

She raised her face and their lips locked in a passionate but curiously asexual kiss, both of them starved for a warmth that they knew they would not find in each other's arms. When it ended, she backed away from him with a burning face and caught her glasses as they slipped off her nose.

"What you must think of me!" she blurted.

He said nothing.

The buttons on her silk blouse were rounded and covered with matching fabric. Strauss had not noticed that, as happens all too frequently with such buttons, they had managed to pull open. Beneath the beige silk, Hotchner saw an almost touchingly plain brassiere of unadorned white cotton with a white plastic front clasp.

"Here," he whispered. "Hold still." He moved closer to her. "Just putting you back together," he whispered as he reached for her buttons. She jerked with panic and embarrassment, but Hotchner shushed her again. Looking every bit as much the stunned ox as Hotchner had earlier, she lowered her hands to her waist and stood motionless while he buttoned her blouse.

When he was done, he took her two hands in his. "Nothing to fear," he told her softly. "This never happened."

She looked into his face intently. "Then, since this never happened, I never told you that I find a stubbly face quite – quite manly. Yours especially. It was hard to keep my hands off it."

He rubbed her hands against his jaw and chuckled. "Then I also never said that you fill out your brassiere magnificently, and it was hard to keep my hands off it."

With mock ferocity, she yanked their joined hands down and moved his fingers against her breasts.

And then there was nothing else to say. The temperature in the room and in the world returned to normal. Hotch pulled his tie out of his pocket. Chief Strauss fumbled around for her glasses case. "Agent Hotchner?"

"Ma'am?"

"Does this mean that we'll start to get along better?"

"I doubt it. We're a pair of pretty healthy egos."

"You're probably right."

"Maybe we won't take it as personally, though. Do you think that's possible?"

He sighed as he knotted his tie. "I don't know about that, ma'am. But at least we know what to do if the tension builds again."

She arched an eyebrow.

"We'll have to see what happens when we put a bristly jaw and a bountiful bosom together."

"Oh, dear, we can't let that happen, Agent Hotchner," she said with a hint of a twinkle.

"Absolutely not, ma'am."

She gave him a silly little fingers-only goodbye wave as he stood in the doorway.

"Have a great time at Cedar Point," she said.

"I plan to, ma'am."

He sketched a salute at her and left her office whistling a cheerful tune.

~ end ~


End file.
